


Anyway

by KALLIOPH



Category: Gossip Girl
Genre: Angst, Gen, Pre-Series, pre-series AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-09-13 20:48:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9141622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KALLIOPH/pseuds/KALLIOPH
Summary: Pre-series. Or rather, pre-series au that would have never produced the show. Chuck and Serena bond over tragedy in their sophomore year of high school. It doesn't matter how you need someone when they're gone.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is inspired by the Kerrigan-Lowdermilk song "Anyway." You don't need to know that, though, but I love it so I thought I'd share it. I've always been interested by the NJBC, and the Chuck/Serena dynamic in particular. I love this weirdly codependent, slightly taboo foursome, so expect more in the future. I also pull the single most quotable line from Wuthering Heights, but I feel it's exactly the kind of thing the show would have done, and you have to commend Emily Bronte for coming up with the most epic-yet-vague line of prose ever written.

Chuck finds her leaning against the cold stone wall near the little side exit. She looks like shit—sick, maybe, or half-dead. Her eyes are bloodshot and her hair is pulled back in a tight ponytail to hide the grease. The seven-inch heels make her long legs look like they’re snapped at the ankles, too thin and bent awkwardly as she leans against the grey stone.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Serena rasps. He thinks maybe he ought to be offended she’s surprised to see him, but Chuck has cultivated a carefully numb interior for such occasions. He holds out his flask, drawing closer to her. She tosses her empty one to the ground and holds her hand out for it. A shiver runs through his spine at how cold her fingers are when they brush his. “What are you doing here?” she asks with a scrape in her voice that sounds painful.

Chuck shoves his hands in his pockets and stares at the pavement. “They’re about to start.”

“Yeah,” Serena says, then takes a swig from his flask. “I mean what are you doing out here with me?”

Chuck looks up to her and thinks he’s never seen eyes look more empty in his entire life. “I can’t go in there,” he shakes his head. “It’s . . . it’s so _stupid,_ ” he spits.

A sour smirk pulls Serena’s lip up by the corner but there’s not a hint of laughter or mirth, nothing warm or even alive. It’s just agreement. “She always read me poetry, you know. Beautiful, romantic stuff. I never understood half of it, but poetry makes her smile.” She pulls a pack of cigarettes out of her purse along with a silver lighter. “She stopped reading it to me a couple of years back, when I started partying more, but sometimes she pulls out these phrases that I just know are from some poem and I just want to hear her read the whole thing to me.” She puts a cigarette between her lips and offers one to him.

Chuck takes it, pulling out his own lighter and staring at the flame for a moment before touching it to the end of the cigarette. “I don’t smoke cigarettes often,” he says because he can’t think of what to say to her story.

“Me neither. I swiped them from my mom.”

Chuck takes a deep drag, letting the warm smoke fill out in his lungs. The tight muscles in his jaw loosen in the wave of calm that spreads through him as he exhales. Serena does the same but coughs a few times on the release. Her throat sounds raw and tender but she marches on, sticking the smoke right back between her lips and puffing again. He wants to ask her something but he isn’t quite sure what. 

“I feel like I can’t breathe,” she says. It’s matter of fact, like she’s telling him that water is wet. “My brain knows I can but it feels like I can’t. Like I’m so full of something else that there’s no room for air.”

Chuck raises an eyebrow as he looks at her in silent question, taking his cigarette between the base of his fingers.

“I think cigarettes actually help. I find them . . . calming. Probably why I don’t smoke them that much when I’m looking to party. I feel like it loosens all this up,” she circles a hand around her chest. “Helps me breathe.”

“I don’t think that’s how they really work.”

Serena shrugs. “Maybe I’m just pathological. Anyway,” she straightens her shoulders and tosses the end of her ponytail over one shoulder, but she doesn’t continue. He sees the hard line of her lips—her clamped jaw and her watery eyes. It comes in waves, he knows, or maybe more like a riptide, no warning, no footing, no knowing which way is up. It’s violent and raw.

“Do you want to go inside?” he asks as the last of the people lingering around the front stairs trickle in.

“No,” she says and looks away. “You can go if you want.”

Chuck shifts his weight, sturdy and staying, and blows grey smoke up to the grey clouds. “I hate churches,” he replies.

“Afraid of being smited?” Serena asks bitterly.

“Something like that,” Chuck nods. “Nate’s in there.”

“Yeah, he’s always been good at church.”

“If you ask the crowd in there it’s because he’s the second fucking coming of Christ,” Chuck mutters. He takes a final pull from the cigarette and stomps the butt with the toe of his dress shoe, allowing himself for just today to care about something other than Nate fucking Archibald.

“It’s not his fault he’s good,” Serena whispers, closing her eyes. It’s cold out, but a drip of sweat forms at her temple. Chuck wonders if it’s possible for her to burn out from the inside. What happens when there’s nothing left to consume inside? “But oh my god I hate him right now. It feels awful to be useless. At least he’s there.”

Chuck almost reaches out for her, but the look on her face is so near agony he is afraid to lose the cool entropy that has been growing inside him for the last few days. “You’re not being useless,” he says in consolation.

“Yes I am. I’m out here, smoking, when I should be inside. I should be with her. Blair is my best friend, Chuck, more than that she’s my sister. I love her so goddamned much I can’t remember not loving her. There is no before Blair for me, and I can’t even get my ass inside the fucking church. They asked me to write the elegy—did you know that? Me, the bad one, the girl who parties too much and cares too little and what did I do? I proved them right!” Tears start stream down her cheeks and she crosses her arms over her ribs like she’s literally trying to hold herself together. “I can’t do that, Chuck, I can’t write that, I can’t say it. I can’t do any of it! They all think they’re right about me, well at least I’m here! Screw her for leaving me here! _Fuck her for dying!_ ” She throws her cigarette to the ground and grinds her palms into her eyes as she cries so damn hard she can’t stay standing and crumples to the ground.

Chuck feels his throat pull tighter and tighter inside him, and his eyes hurt as he tries to keep the tears back. He swipes at his nose, looking away from Serena crying on the ground. Chuck can feel the heat building in his body as he fights to keep it all behind his walls.

“She didn’t just up an leave,” he says. Even he can hear the waver in his voice.

“I can’t eat, I can’t sleep,” Serena shakes her head, hugging her knees beneath her chin. “I can’t look Eleanor in the eye. Chuck, I don’t know how to be S without B.”

He slumps down against the wall beside her, staring at his own toes. They won’t be friends in a year, he thinks, the three of them. They won’t survive without Blair. They love each other fiercely, but Blair is the only one who cares. Was, he reminds himself. Was the only one who cared. Anyway. He doesn’t know what to tell Serena because he’s never known Serena without Blair. “We don’t have a choice,” he says finally.

Serena leans her temple against her knees and looks at him sideways. Even with puffy red eyes and streaked makeup, the look in her eyes is utterly terrifying. Serena van der Woodsen isn’t a queen for nothing, she knows a thing or two about saving face and steely gazes, but the calm in her eyes is absolutely hopeless. There’s no light in her green eyes, not even sadness. “We do,” she says. Her breathing hasn’t evened out yet from her sobs, but Chuck has never taken her more seriously in his life. “The easy way,” she clarifies, and Chuck can’t say he’s never had that dark thought, but he never thought he’d hear Serena say it out loud.

“You’re just grieving,” he says, and he wishes he could mean it, but he understands. Blair is not easily lost. She is a part of Serena so vital that Chuck is surprised her heart didn’t instinctually stop with Blair’s. There’s a reason the sun and moon have a mythic love story in cultures far and wide. Chuck would believe they were further proof, another iteration of the sun and moon, cosmically epic.

“Maybe,” Serena says. “You’re not, though.”

The stabbing sensation rushes through him quick and dirty, replacing his veins with broken glass and his blood with acid. Silently, he reaches into the box and withdraws another cigarette, lighting it between his lips. He closes his eyes as he breathes, forcing the numbness back through his body. “I liked it when she read, too,” he admits. He can feel the shake in his fingers but if he isn’t brave enough to go inside the church for Blair, maybe he can be this brave for her out here, with Serena.

Chuck remembers the way Blair’s pink lips pursed and parted, reading _Wuthering Heights_ aloud. They were all together, studying for an English test, back at the end of eighth grade and Blair had insisted he come to ensure a passing grade which would allow him acceptance into St. Jude’s. It didn’t really matter, he’d get in anyway, but he came all the same because Blair wouldn’t let up about it and she looked particularly alluring in her blue dress. For a rather repressed book, Chuck remembers quite liking it when she read it, the way her mouth worked sinuously over the words and her brown eyes scanned with quick wits. “ _Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,_ ” she said in her low register, imitating the Catherine she had constructed in her mind. He remembers that Blair was desperately in love with Nate and Nate was . . . well perhaps not desperate, but in love for sure. And yet he remembers that when her mouth spilled those words her eyes flickered up from the page to his own for a brief eternity. It was a silent agreement, a mutual understanding. They would never speak of this—Blair kept right on reading—but it was known between the two of them. Whatever souls were, theirs were the same.

He tells Serena as much. She listens and he wants to believe he notices the tiniest hint of light return to her eyes, but he doesn’t dare hope. Either way, she nods. She and Blair may be two parts of a pair, but he and Blair are one and the same, cut from the same cloth, so to speak. But in the end it doesn’t matter how they need her, different or the same, because she isn’t there. Not anymore.

“Who dies in their sophomore year of high school?” Serena asks, drinking from his flask again.

Chuck shoots her a glare. Morbid humor usually goes over well with him, but after such a revealing story he expects something a little more solemn from Serena.

She sighs and tucks a flyaway piece of hair behind her ear. “Sorry. I’m just . . . I’m trying not to cry again. I don’t think I have enough snot or tears left anyway, but I—“ she pauses, bites her bottom lip, then continues in that stripped-down voice, “I think I could anyway. I think I could cry forever. So I’m making stupid jokes instead.” She tilts the flask again, but it’s empty now. “Shit,” she mutters.

Chuck runs a hand through his hair and exhales. He can hear the faint groan of the organ and hymns being sung with shaky voices from inside the church. Blair would probably like that, he thinks. She’s always liked the Catholic pageantry, the songs.

“She used to pray sometimes,” Serena says. “She was never really sure who she was praying to, or if she really believed, but she did anyway.”

Chuck nods, slipping smoke out between his lips before rising to his feet and offering Serena a hand. “Then I’m sure she knows that was never our thing. Come on. Let’s go get drunk or high or whatever. Let’s just get out of here.”

He can see her debate with herself, but it is short lived. She takes his hand and stumbles into him as she stands on shaky legs in too-high heels. He lets her lean on him, even though she tries not to, all the way to his car. He drops her carefully in the back before throwing one last glance to the church entrance. There are violets everywhere, and Chuck can’t help but shake his head because everyone and their mother knows Blair loved peonies. It’s the kind of thing that would have set her off at an event like this, if she weren’t forever more unmoving. Maybe she’d be happy he didn’t go to her violet-covered funeral, or maybe she’d be happy he was taking care of Serena. Who the fuck could know?

But, as he climbs in and watches the picture of her up on the tripod disappear behind them, he thinks to himself that she might have understood, at least. They were the same, anyway.


End file.
